In OpenText™ Cloud Editions (CE) 21.4, the OpenText Developer Cloud has taken a wider view of APIs. CE 21.4 brings a lot of new features and new capabilities that enhance the experience of managing the development process using our Developer console, and we have delivered new services to our Analyze capabilities and our Store and Manage capabilities. CE 21.4 also gives OpenText the first-ever Information Management as a Service platform, or IMaaS. Stephen Ludlow, SVP, Product Management at OpenText will provide an overview of this new direction in the Developer Keynote at OpenText World.
For developers, it is now possible to manage information across the entire lifecycle from a single API.
Other highlights of CE 21.4 include:
Developer Experience
The website has been updated to reflect the different needs of the different developers that are coming to understand our APIs for our products or make use of our cloud services (see for yourself).
More direct access from the Developer console to other resources include the Admin Center for tenant and user management. (Come to the Dev 200 and Dev 201 sessions at OpenText World for a deep dive).
Better organization of the different types of services to help reduce clicks to get to the information you need (see an example here).
Cloud API services
The new OpenText™ Magellan Risk Guard service is added to our IMaaS bundle of services. The team will demo how the new Risk Guard can be integrated into applications during the keynote.
The API for OpenText™ Core Content has documentation for the new services to help developers understand how to build extensions. (Come to the Dev 106 session at OpenText World for more details).
The API for OpenText™ Core Case Management has documentation available to integrate case management into your applications. (Come to the Dev 107 session at OpenText World for further information).
Learning and developer enablement
Updated documentation and tutorials to help get you started faster. Our Getting started guide and Demo App are great ways to understand the IMaaS bundle.
More great video How-To content is added to our How-To channel every month.
Expanded way to find our code samples and App samples on GitHub and Postman- with our commitment to keep bringing content to the tools that developers use!
Whether you are a large company or small business operation you will face a similar challenge when it comes to connecting with customers and trading partners around the world. Namely struggling to find the right people, processes, and technologies to seamlessly integrate your digital business ecosystem.
Many smaller and medium-sized businesses have thought that seamless business integration was reserved for much larger organizations with greater budgets, larger internal IT teams, and who typically work with integration outsourcing vendors or systems integrators The term Managed Service has been used to describe the delivery of people, process, and technology to support the integration of a supply chain and to internal business applications such as ERP. However, in many cases, companies are keen to retain control of certain aspects of their B2B environment and this is where vendors such as OpenText™ have introduced self-service tools to empower users to manage their own integration environments.
We recently undertook a study with IDG to obtain the latest insights into what companies thought about when outsourcing their business integration to a trusted partner. We decided to survey both large and small businesses so that we could see whether there were any major differences in responses. Here are just a few results from the survey.
OpenText has been providing integration-related Managed Services for more than 25 years and over 950 global enterprises around the world are using this environment. OpenText has acquired many integration vendors and consolidated capabilities into our Trading Grid™ platform. However, for Cloud Editions (CE) 21.4, we are introducing a new tiered approach for how companies can consume our integration capabilities. So, whether you are a large global automotive OEM or a small supplier of aftermarket parts, large and small companies alike will be connected to a single integration platform which we call OpenText Trading Grid. Trading Grid is the world’s largest business network and supports thousands of supply chains around the world, including 80% of Gartner’s Top 25 supply chains.
The tiered environment provides both a packaged approach of capabilities and pricing and hence will allow any size of company to establish an enterprise-grade integration platform. Our existing Managed Services offering will become an ‘Enterprise’ level tier and for CE 21.4 we will be introducing a ‘Foundation’ tier. Over time we will introduce further tiers to allow companies to select the integration capabilities they wish to consume and as all tiers are built on the same platform it means that over time companies can upgrade to the next tier as required, thus reducing migration efforts significantly.
The Foundation tier is the current starting point for customers keen to embrace an enterprise-grade integration environment. The key capabilities of this tier include:
Base connectivity supporting AS2, SFTP, FTPs and HTTPS
Support for up to 50 trading partners
Support for up to 100 document maps
Reactive 24×5 support but with the option of reactive 24×7 and proactive 24×5 support services
CE 21.4 truly enables any size company to deploy and manage an enterprise-grade integration environment. Over and above the core capabilities listed above, the Foundation tier offers a number of extended capabilities to allow the smallest of companies to accelerate their business ecosystem providing a faster ‘time to live’ compared to managing in-house integration activities, namely:
Providing a suite of self-service tools to empower companies to manage their own connectivity and day to day collaboration with trading partners
Accessing a prebuilt library of ‘trading partner kits’ that offers both document and connectivity support for the more popular trading hubs around the world, across multiple industry sectors
Deploying off the shelf application adaptors to connect with mid-market size ERP systems such as Oracle Netsuite, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and other packages from SAP, Infor and Sage
Other capabilities can be leveraged from our full Enterprise tier offering including access to our Professional Services team but these will be offered as at-cost options. These capabilities will allow companies to establish a state-of-the-art digital foundation across their business ecosystem, a platform that can help to underpin digital transformation initiatives and provide a platform for business growth. Companies today face a constant battle to prioritize budgets and resources to deliver many different types of IT and business restructuring projects. The introduction of this tiered approach to business integration will help companies consume integration services based on the size of their business and the complexity of the integration to be undertaken.
For more information on our Foundation tier offering, please visit our website.
Organizations know that the old ways of doing business—manual processes, isolated systems, ever-increasing information sprawl—are not sustainable. The next few years will be a pivotal time as pressure to digitally transform increases and the need for organizations to adapt faster grows. By adopting new technology and purpose-built solutions that are quicker and easier to deploy, configure, manage and use, organizations will be able to keep pace with the changing needs of their employees.
As a next-generation SaaS content services platform, OpenText™ Core Content, which was introduced earlier this year, helps organizations quickly manage the content lifecycle around their existing business processes while reaping the simplified deployment, management, and implementation benefits of SaaS.
New innovations for Core Content, as part of Cloud Editions (CE) 21.4, empower employees to manage, access and share the documents they need within the applications they use daily.
Simple and secure SaaS content management for Salesforce users
Core Content introduces SaaS content management for Salesforce users via an integration to the Salesforce Sales and Service Cloud. Users can:
Create Business Workspaces for Salesforce objects and sync metadata
Seamlessly move between Salesforce and Core Content with SSO authentication
Increase productivity by having content readily available within the context of the business process
Alleviate existing content lifecycle management limitations and extract greater value from the Salesforce Sales and Service cloud
The Core Content integration to Salesforce enables business users with advanced document management capabilities to enhance collaboration and efficiencies inside the organization, and externally with customers and partners, while seamlessly automating records management processes and controls behind the scenes.
Example of the OpenText Core Content integration to Salesforce.
Combined business content management, collaboration andco-authoring in Microsoft Teams
Core Content gives users freedom to choose how they want to collaborate on documents with their peers via an integration to Microsoft Teams. Users can:
Share documents from Core Content to a Microsoft Teams channel
Leverage the extensive collaborative capabilities of Microsoft Teams such as co-authoring
Stop the share and revoke access as needed
Example of the OpenText Core Content integration to Microsoft Teams.
Comprehensive business content management using Core Content with OpenText™ Core Case Management
Core Content deepens the integration to Core Case Management to enable comprehensive business content management within a single user interface (UI). Users can:
Easily view and organize content generated by Core Case Management business processes within the Core Content workspace
Manage the content lifecycle in context of its formal and informal business processes
The combination of Core Content and Core Case Management brings the proven OpenText model of deeply embedding content into process to the SaaS environment, making content available when and where people work and forming a backbone for modern work.
Example of the OpenText Core Content integration to Core Case Management.
Learn more
Interested in learning more about the next generation SaaS content services platform from OpenText? Request a free trial or check out our How-To video playlist on YouTube to see the product in action.
Core Content is part of an industry-leading, integrated portfolio of off-cloud and cloud offerings that offer flexible, hybrid solutions to both simple and complex content management challenges. Read more CE 21.4 highlights.
“Well, that was fun,” said no one ever in the midst of a global pandemic! But what can be said of 2021 is that we’re gradually returning to a new normal. Law firms and corporate legal departments have regrouped and are emerging stronger than ever. Globally we have faced new challenges and, true to the principles of human ingenuity, we have found new solutions.
With Legal Tech CE 21.4, we take this opportunity to look back at what we have learned over the last two years. It’s important to reflect on new legal tech, business trends and challenges that have emerged. Looking towards a more promising future, OpenText™ eDiscovery solutions continue to help organizations and their legal counsel face what’s to come, armed with the technology and know-how to be cost-conscious, efficient, and successful.
Some of the most important (and most challenging) trends of the past year include:
1. New communication channels add complexity to the eDiscovery review process.
The first digital shift was from paper and fax to email and text messages. Over the past few years, the explosion of ephemeral chat data, including Microsoft® Teams, Bloomberg, and Slack™, has taken the complexity of organizing, collecting, analyzing, and reviewing data from already overwhelming numbers of enterprise data stores to an entirely new level. Review teams now need to synthesize complex chat threads in addition to email and other forms of electronic communication—but piecing together the story and the facts from amongst disparate sources is often unwieldly.
How can review teams solve this challenge?
With more than 600 billion business chat messages generated in 2020 alone, the best end-to-end eDiscovery solutions offer ways to review and understand business communications that go far beyond email threads. OpenText™ Axcelerate™ tames chat review with efficiency and automation by making it easy to ingest chat data with a connector and pre-configured parser for Microsoft Teams, a pre-configured parser for Slack, and a generic parser for all other forms of chat data. In addition to intuitively displaying chat conversations, Axcelerate allows reviewers to break down chat histories by date to narrow the volume of chat data that requires review, and easily view all custodians involved in a chat thread with the chat participant panel. Axcelerate also provides administrators with the power to collapse chat threads to rapidly assess chat review requirements. Building on recent chat feature enhancements, Axcelerate CE 21.4 further enhances review efficiency by allowing reviewers to preview chat attachments so that they can quickly assess which attachments warrant closer review and which can be skipped.
2. Data privacy protection and response is more closely scrutinized than ever by both the public and regulatory authorities.
Compliance with increasingly prevalent data privacy laws which often impose strict timelines for responding to data subject access requests/subject rights requests (DSARs/SRRs) means that organizations must be prepared to identify, report on, redact and delete personal data to meet data privacy compliance obligations avoid fines and sanctions.
Several states have passed comprehensive data privacy laws, including California, Virginia, and Colorado, and U.S. federal legislation also protects specific types of personal information such as health records and credit information. In Europe, comprehensive data privacy law, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), requires companies to ask for permissions to share data and gives individuals rights to access, delete, or control the use of that data.
How can organizations support compliance?
Axcelerate CE 21.4 introduces Enhanced Regular Expressions (RegEx) to detect and protect personal, and confidential information. Enhanced RegEx protects data privacy and speeds review by auto detecting PII, PCI and PHI. In this latest release, Axcelerate’s pre-configured PII pattern recognition includes:
Passport numbers
Medicare numbers
Birthdates
Taxpayer IDs
Credit card numbers
Email addresses
SSNs
Axcelerate RegEx helps teams protect against inadvertent disclosure of personal information to opposing counsel in compliance with increasingly common and stringent data privacy mandates. Axcelerate’s RegEx enhancements also aid in redacting the PII of third parties while fulfilling subject rights requests and play a critical role in itemizing data exposed during breaches.
Example of Axcelerate RegEx pre-configured PII pattern recognition in action.
3. Reducing costs and maximizing internal efficiency remain key legal department priorities.
Over the past year, corporate legal budgets have decreased while unplanned, high-urgency work have increased. Corporate legal teams had to manage a host of new and novel legal issues (some related to the pandemic) with the same or even reduced teams, while under pressure to control runaway outside counsel spend and improve internal efficiency. Corporate law leaders assessed their technology strategy, moving away from eDiscovery point solutions to more comprehensive end-to-end platforms. Law firms had to adopt more creative service delivery strategies to remain competitive in an increasingly cost-conscious market—and reevaluate the way they deliver eDiscovery services to their corporate clients—from cloud-based eDiscovery technology to managed review, investigation support and data collection services.
How can legal departments reduce costs while increasing efficiency?
Enhancements to the Axcelerate platform over the last two years have helped legal teams find the critical facts faster, shaving hours off review tasks and lowering overall costs. Predictive search, Axcelerate Visualizer, a powerful visual data analytics dashboard, and powerful integrated text analytic tools, introduced in prior releases, all increase review efficiency.
Example of the OpenText Axcelerate Visualizer dashboard view.
Axcelerate CE 21.4 introduces additional enhancements to lower review costs and maximize efficiency even further. For example, Axcelerate’s enhanced document coding overturn reporting allows review managers to spot and correct inconsistencies early on and avoid significant rework later, expediting the review process and increasing Quality Control efficiency and accuracy.
Getting ready for what’s next
Looking for more ways to improve efficiency and privacy compliance within your firm or organization while reducing costs? Find out how OpenText™ eDOCS CE 21.4 and OpenText™ Decisiv™ 21.4 can help.
As the legal community seeks to rebuild, OpenText Legal Tech remains committed to helping organizations and their law firms simplify and streamline eDiscovery and investigations processes with advanced technology solutions and supporting services. Whatever the emerging challenges are—from new forms of electronic data to new and more onerous regulatory and compliance regimes—OpenText continues to innovate so that you can remain competitive and agile no matter what comes next.
If there’s a universal truth that has emerged in the business environment during the disruption of the past year, it’s the pressing need to modernize processes and seek out more flexible technology tools. Low-code development is being rapidly adopted to address this need.
OpenText™ AppWorks™ enables users with minimal or no coding experience to create new software capabilities that get to the heart of digital initiatives and accelerate them. Low-code offers one of the best approaches to evolving without unravelling to smoothly introduce easy-to-use tools that improve operational efficiency, simplify complex processes, and support customer-friendly digital experiences. With Cloud Editions (CE) 21.4, new usability improvements further deliver on those objectives.
User-friendly enhancements
Let’s begin with enhancements for the end-user in a case management scenario. Now, instead of applying filters every time to a list of cases, users can save their filters for re-use. We’ve also streamlined the user interface for faster performance, even for those working at home with slower Wi-Fi connections.
Example of OpenText AppWorks option to save filters.
A related enhancement is a refreshed layout for case histories, with business-friendly messages that provide a holistic view of a case. While it’s still possible to drill down to the history of an individual action or item, users can now also choose an at-a-glance view that enables a full understanding of the case and interrelated items.
For those who manage contracts in OpenText™ Contract Center, AppWorks CE 21.4 enables business analysts to add attributes on their own. The user can now simply plug in a new field without needing to submit an enhancement request.
Example of the AppWorks Accelerator vaccination management application.
More building blocks for developers
Developers can take advantage of new functionality in AppWorks CE 24.1 with new Accelerators, prebuilt configurations that help them get a head start on application development projects. For our own organization, OpenText organized a COVID-19 vaccine drive for our employees in India and their families using an application built using AppWorks. It proved so successful that we’ve made it available as an AppWorks Accelerator.
On the technical side, CE 24.1 features a new API for the client that simplifies customizations. Now, the API is built into the application, which eliminates the need to refresh a page to see the custom code.
OpenText™ Cloud Editions (CE) 21.4 features some exciting updates across the OpenText enterprise applications ecosystem, including significant enhancements to our AI and Analytics products:
OpenText™ Magellan™ Risk Guard
OpenText™ Magellan™ Data Discovery, Cloud Edition
OpenText™ Magellan™ for Data Science
OpenText™ Magellan™ Text Mining
OpenText™ Magellan™ BI & Reporting
OpenText™ Magellan™ Integration Center
OpenText™ Output Transformation Server
Magellan Risk Guard
Configure and use custom models
Each company is unique, likely with specific types of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) or industry-specific information which analytical projects need to be able to accurately analyze. With CE 21.4, when you integrate a custom pre-existing classification or PII model into Risk Guard, it can now be displayed and configured by a project owner just like any of our out-of-the-box models.
Review content in context
Risk Guard has also integrated OpenText™ Intelligent Viewing, allowing you to go beyond review of raw data, and instead, view a piece of content in its native format from within Risk Guard before deciding on the necessary action to take.
Example of OpenText Intelligent Viewing integration in action within the Magellan Risk Guard user interface.
Get Risk Guard as a service
In another exciting announcement, Risk Guard is now available as a service through the OpenText™ Developer Cloud. Developer Cloud is OpenText’s next-generation “Information Management as a Service” platform that delivers a wide collection of APIs and tools to create custom solutions, connect to OpenText products, and extend existing investments. This enables Risk Guard to be easily incorporated into new or existing applications and brings risk assessment projects closer to content residing in the OpenText Cloud.
Identify encrypted or protected content
To safeguard an organization from risky content, assessment projects need to analyze as wide a variety of content as possible. Risk Guard now enables files that are encrypted or secured, such as protected PDFs, to be identified within their own category. Such files may prevent automated analysis due to their security mechanism and can then inform the project owner if the documents are in unsecured locations or require additional review or remediation.
Uncover credentials stored within documents
Insider threats are a rising concern for organizations. From 2018 to 2020 the frequency of inside threat incidents has risen by 47 percent, with credential stealing representing 14 percent of all such incidents. To help businesses safeguard their organizations, Magellan Text Mining introduced a new model in CE 21.3 to identify login credentials that were left exposed within content or documents. In CE 21.4, Risk Guard has integrated that same model to deliver these capabilities within its established project analysis and out-of-the-box user interface (UI).
Magellan Data Discovery
Support for the Google Cloud
To support your organization’s cloud strategy, Magellan Data Discovery can now be deployed to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) allowing for faster analysis of data located within the cloud.
Start using Box Plot charts
We’re excited to introduce a new data visualization, the Box Plot Chart! This chart is often used by analytics experts to analyze statistical distribution of continuous variables such as age, income, total revenue, or temperature, and understand the upper and lower boundaries of the data set.
Example of Magellan Data Discovery new Box Plot Chart data visualization.
Audit data in-app
Having clean data is critical to performing analysis efficiently and quickly delivering insights. With this release, users can access a new data profiling tab to easily review discrete values, statistics, null values, and outliers, and determine if data cleaning is needed.
Magellan for Data Science
Run machine learning models as a service
Magellan machine learning models can now be exposed from a RESTful service, providing an easy way to integrate AI into existing processes and applications.
Run mock predictions on models
The Magellan™ Machine Learning Model Management Tool now allows for mock predictions to be run against a model. This means that an analytical expert can confirm that a model is generating accurate predictions without requiring code to be written or use of an external application.
Magellan Text Mining
Analyze Italian more accurately
In this release, we’ve improved the accuracy of Named Entity Recognition (NER) for Italian, the first language of approximately 65 million people around the world. NER identifies the real-world objects that we as humans easily recognize, such as names of people or organizations, geographic locations, or phone numbers.
Manage custom models through a self-service UI
In the latest iteration of our modernized UI, there is now a self-service UI for building, maintaining and testing any Named Entity Extraction dictionary, delivering a streamlined and intuitive interface to manage custom models.
Example of the updated Magellan Text Mining self-service user interface.
Magellan BI & Reporting
View reports through an accessible web experience
The standard and interactive report viewers for Magellan BI & Reporting now include support for screen readers, keyboard navigation, alternate text for visualizations, optional titles, large-print font styles, and more. This ensures that our web-based reports provide a highly interactive and empowering experience for persons with disabilities and progresses Magellan BI & Reporting towards WCAG 2.1 AA compliance.
Magellan Integration Center
Retrieve documents in place
Magellan Integration Center now provides REST endpoints to access ECM documents. This technology powers the ability to use Intelligent Viewing capabilities to view original files without requiring the document to be moved or copied from its environment.
OpenText Output Transformation Server
Transform documents in the cloud
High-volume documents across on-prem and cloud repositories need to be stored for retention purposes, but also must be available to customers in a wide range of formats PDF. With this release, OpenText Output Transformation Server is now available as a Cloud Edition hosted in the OpenText Cloud for high-volume document transformation. Automated Output Accessibility and Document Accessibility can also be deployed to the OpenText Cloud for high-volume and ad-hoc transformation of documents into accessible formats.
It’s no secret that engineering just about anything requires the work of an entire team, and these days that can be remarkably complex. With remote working increasingly becoming a norm, the complexities of industrial design and manufacturing processes, and shifting regulatory landscapes that can have impacts on product development the need for transparent processes, streamlined workflows, and high-quality information has never been more important.
The partnership between OpenText and Dassault Systemes is bringing connected engineering solutions to you like never before, built on Dassault’s CATIA computer-aided design products and supporting by OpenText’s cloud-based managed services.
Connecting silos for connected engineering
Connected engineering is quickly becoming the de facto way of designing, developing, and iterating engineering products, but what does it really mean?
Well, for starters it means that the silos in which teams operated are a thing of the past. CATIA Connected Engineering brings together each of the abilities and skills of the entire engineering processes with a single pane of data, information, and modeling so that everyone involved is confident they are working on with the most relevant version available. Let’s look at a workflow example and how connected engineering makes it possible:
Step 1. The Marketing Analyst explains requirements and shares ideas.
Step 2. The CATIA Designer begins work with the 3D data, beginning with an existing design that can be shared with everyone along the workflow.
Step 3. The CATIA Designer adds elements to the product based on the market analyst’s suggestions.
Step 4. The manager reviews the updated design and provides feedback.
Step 5. A second CATIA Designer opens the project to update based on the manager’s feedback.
Step 6. The first CATIA Designer also opens the project to continue adding required elements to the design.
Step 7. The manager reviews and validates the design.
Step 8. The procurement team accesses the design to create an updated cost analysis.
That’s a lot of steps, right? It’s a complicated dance from one person to the next just to implement a seemingly simple upgrade to an already existing design – but with CATIA Connected Engineering, including the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, all of those steps can happen seamlessly and each person responsible for execution can is completely assured that the version they are working with is the most up-to-date available. That’s because each member of the team is working within the same platform, on the same design, potentially at the same time without ever having to package and send anything from one person to the next. Everything is captured right in CATIA and 3DEXPERIENCE. Even when members of the team are on the go, they have access to the content anytime from anywhere with a dedicated app called “Design Review.”
A single source of truth
What’s so important about connecting all these steps? Well, setting aside the ease of workflow that CATIA and 3DEXPERIENCE enable, connecting engineering is all about a “single source of truth.” Collaboration is ineffective when efforts are duplicated or information needs to be reinterpreted in each step – in fact, that’s not collaboration at all. That’s inefficient, silo-based working and it’s costing your company time and resources.
Truly collaborative engineering environments – including project data, sketches, and marketing specs – eliminate the silos and put everyone on the same page at the same time. The backbone of connected engineering is CATIA and 3DEXPERIENCE, and OpenText’s cloud infrastructure means that collaborative environment is available anytime, anywhere, on any device.
Access the series of videos detailing this and other 3DEXPERIENCE journeys.
Cyber resilience is no longer optional, it is an essential component of Information Management to protect the most valuable assets: data and business processes. Effective cybersecurity should essentially contain a risk mitigation program that covers the unknown – equipping organizations with reactive and proactive capabilities to prevent, discover and respond to threats from insiders, cybercriminals or nation states. Organizations must have access to experts and knowledge to defend against these threats.
In order to bring order out of chaos and get foundations for a cybersecurity risk management program, we would recommend a program that provides the flexibility to plan and adapt your organization’s yearly cybersecurity program as “things happen”. Build a plan to review privacy management processes and perform routine pro-active investigations for advanced persistent threats. Adaptability is key so that when “things happen”, the plan can be adjusted to leverage certified incident investigators for a breach response.
Building on decades of experience in digital forensics, endpoint security, cybersecurity incident response and e-discovery, OpenText extended its expert services beyond EnCase software, offering the knowledge and skills built over the years to ensure an organization’s cyber security posture.
The EnCase Advisory Program (EAP) augments and strengthens your organization’s teams by accelerating cyber resilience providing consulting services in the areas of product readiness, eDiscovery, investigations, risk and compliance, digital forensics, incident response and managed security services. The program is tailored at the right tier for your organization, from small and medium businesses to large enterprise and government agencies, with a broad range of services detailed in the OpenText Security Services Catalog.
Visit the Security Services page for more on working with OpenText cybersecurity experts.
Special Enfuse cybersecurity program promotional offer
Receive up to 100 free hours and complementary program reviews on new EAP or renewal order placed before January 31st, 2022. Details available from an OpenText Security Services Client Manager and valid when referencing promotional code EAPSpecialEnfuseOffer.
If you’re here then you are at least marginally associated with some aspect of your company’s supply chain, and if you are associated with any aspect of your company’s supply chain then it comes as no surprise that supply chain integration has never been more pertinent. It’s all over the news: supply chain disruption is impacting all corners of the world. Massive container ships are idling offshore unable to dock; trucks and drivers are unavailable to move freight overland; there are the increasingly hyperbolic calls to “save the holidays” by buying now in anticipation of supply bottlenecks. Among all this, you’re having to take a hard look at your supply chain services – in some cases even against your will because of corporate spin-offs – and determine if you’re setting yourself and your company up for future resilience.
You are not alone.
Hundreds of others just like you are asking the same questions about their own supply chain integration, and in many cases coming to the same answers: it’s time to find a new partner for your supply chain integration.
There are a few factors you should seriously consider when looking to migrate to a new business network:
SCALE
The network effect is very real and very relevant. Scale is achieved by moving your supply chain into the cloud, which gives you access to the most trading partners along with insights into supplier ethical practices, an easy onboarding system for new partners, and the flexibility to react to disruptions as quickly as possible.
SCOPE
Supply chains are all about connectivity, and those connections are no longer just linear – they are evolving into digital supply networks. The scope of products and services that integrate into your supply chain means you can connect your business to anything (we call that B2A) to have unprecedented insight with IoT applications and API integrations. Not only that, but system-agnostic applications can connect your supply network to any other for maximum visibility.
SERVICE
Changing to a new partner and continually managing your supply chain systems can be a daunting task no matter the size of your company. And you know that supply chain disruption isn’t discriminatory; it affects every business. You must balance your resource use – whether that’s the time and commitment of your employees or the budget you have available – and find the maximum productivity at the optimum cost. Sometimes you just need someone else to do it for you; a trusted partner who can augment your IT team with additional people, processes and technologies as part of an outsourced integration environment, providing further flexibility and resilience to future business disruption.
And of course,
COST
Let me reiterate what I just mentioned above – supply chain disruption is not discriminatory. Therefore, the benefits of a modern, digital supply chain should be available to any sized business, from the enterprise level to the small and medium sized businesses. Cost should not be a barrier, nor should it limit the quality of the tools you are using. You need a solution that allows you to choose what you need at a cost that works for you, knowing that its built on the same cloud based business network that every other company is using and that it can scale as you do.
This is where I’m sure you expect the sales pitch. You’re reading this on the OpenText™ blog, after all. I could beguile you with statistics about industry leadership, network scale, and any other number of leading metrics but I’m not going to do that.
Instead, all I’m going to do is strongly encourage you to take a minute to get to know us. You can do that in a couple different ways. First, you could watch this video (it’s punchy, I think you’ll like it):
Click for the video
Got a high level sense of how OpenText stands out? Great – now you can get to know us a bit better.
You can see more about the OpenText Business Network solutions by checking out our video replays from the recent ConneXions event:
Businesses can quickly adapt innovative technology to remain resilient and optimize internal resources by leveraging public cloud marketplaces. Digital procurement through public cloud marketplaces is a low-touch way to discover, try, and purchase software needed for immediate access. Organizations can buy through standard contracts and pre-allocated budgets, streamlining procurement and simplifying vendor management, bringing company-wide benefits.
Public cloud growth continues
Cloud initiates that were once stalled suddenly became the key to surviving COVID-19. A Gartner report on the trends driving the public cloud sector predicts that the public cloud industry will grow massively over the next few years, eventually accounting for more than 45% of all enterprise IT spending by 2026.
Cloud marketplaces: The new digital way to procure
Enterprises increasingly turn to public cloud marketplaces as an efficient and more convenient alternative to typical sales processes changing buying behaviors, and now they are here to stay. The adoption of cloud marketplace buying has shifted from an early adopter pattern to mainstream.
In 2021, 61% of buyers said they had purchased software through one of the cloud marketplaces—a 39% increase over 2020, with nearly all these purchases taking place in Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure marketplaces. Research suggests that 80% of sales interactions will happen through digital channels by 2025.1
Enterprise buyers get value faster purchasing through a cloud marketplace and in 2021 pointed to these benefits that help their bottom line:
43% take advantage of committed spend with Cloud Providers
42% accelerate time to value
36% simplify procurement
32% standardized contracts
32% fast access to tools
Why is cloud marketplace procurement the best decision for your business?
1. Combine software and cloud spend to fast-track cloud initiatives
Access to technology and innovative solutions drives companies to migrate their workloads to the cloud, whether it’s a move and improve (lift & shift) from on-premises to public cloud or an opportunity to modernize their IT environment. The Flexera 2021 State of the Cloud Report reveals 59% of respondents use cloud heavily and have reached the advanced cloud maturity level.
As more companies look to move their workloads to the cloud, many buyers will start their software procurement via marketplaces to combine software and cloud spend to maximize contract value. Transacting through the marketplace expedites the entire process from discovery to trial, purchase, and deployment.
2. Get big value: Drawdown committed cloud spend
Cloud enterprise agreements provide hefty volume-based discounts to organizations. Purchasing business-critical software through public cloud marketplaces reduces a customer’s cloud commit. If you aren’t taking advantage of marketplace procurement, you are missing out. A survey found that 77% of buyer respondents have some enterprise cloud agreement (EA) in place, and of those, 90% say they plan to purchase via Marketplace in the future.
3. Private offers provide bespoke terms and pricing
With private offers, organizations get a tailored solution that aligns with their business instead of a “one-size-fits-all” solution. It allows businesses to work with their software provider, negotiate pricing, terms, and conditions, and then transact through the public cloud marketplace. OpenText™ uses private offers to empower customers to run their Information Management (IM) workloads anywhere, and OpenText™ Cloud Managed Services (CMS) may be procured via the Google Cloud, AWS, or Microsoft Azure marketplaces through a private offer transaction. Customers can use their public cloud commitments for OpenText CMS while leveraging the benefits of a simplified and expedited procurement process.
OpenText CMS enhances a customer’s experience on public clouds and brings a multitude of business benefits:
30% TCO reduction for customers that are running on-premises
Single SLA for customer with 99.99% availability option
Service is managed by the most knowledgeable team in the world with direct access to product team
Less overhead for finance and operations
In the past few years, organizations have incorporated many different SaaS vendors into their business. According to Forbes, SaaS revenue is projected to be $369 billion by 2024, increasing $200 billion in five years. SaaS purchases do not fare well for many procurement departments. More vendors mean more overhead to manage the purchasing process. Buying software via a marketplace is helpful as it reduces their workload compared to purchasing products from each vendor, one at a time.
OpenText: Making it easier to do business
To support customers in their digital transformation journey, OpenText is selectively listing and transacting on the marketplaces of our three public cloud partners: Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure. Customers benefit from a simplified and expedited procurement using marketplaces to procure OpenText solutions. OpenText customers can utilize their public cloud commits to pay for OpenText Cloud Managed Services and get customized terms and conditions with a private offer. Connect with your OpenText Account Executive if you’re interested in purchasing through a marketplace private offer and learn how OpenText on Public Cloud accelerates your cloud strategies.
